


Dead Is Better

by draculard



Category: Pet Sematary (1989)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Ghost romance, M/M, Medical Kink, Mild Gore, Multi, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-01
Updated: 2019-07-01
Packaged: 2020-05-31 13:13:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19426696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/draculard/pseuds/draculard
Summary: Rachel and Louis each have their own private ghosts.





	Dead Is Better

At night, the warm, solid heat of Louis’s body next to hers melts into something different, and Rachel can feel the hard knobs of Zelda’s spine beneath her fingers. She feels skin, clammy and cold and so familiar it hurts, and she feels the expansion of Zelda’s chest as she takes a single, laborious breath.

With her eyes closed,

With the lights off,

She can practically see Zelda in the bed beside her, and one second Zelda is nothing but white, wasted skin and twisted bones, and the next second Zelda is something else entirely, something Rachel really only remembers from photographs she saw as a child. Zelda with thick, attractive hair, her skin glowing and healthy, her eyes soft.

Her lips full.

Sometimes these night terrors -— visions — flashbacks — don’t exactly cause Rachel distress. Sometimes she hears a whisper, _Rachel,_ in a voice that isn’t raspy, that doesn’t make her break out in shivers. A voice that sounds young and naive and honeyed. Zelda before the illness. Before she became a nightmare.

She reaches for Zelda’s hand in the dark and holds it tight, close to her mouth. She kisses Zelda’s knuckles — just a light brush of her lips — and she can’t decide if the skin is soft and smooth or…

But it doesn’t bear thinking about. She runs her hands up Zelda’s arms and finds her face. She leans in blindly.

Her lips find Zelda’s.

Zelda kisses her back.

* * *

Louis comes to appreciate the sensation of dried mud on his feet the same way he forced himself not to blink in medical school when he was faced with blood. Some students never get over that basic human squeamishness — the revulsion everyone carries for dead bodies, for disease, for gore.

Some students get over it too well.

Louis comes to appreciate the peculiar wounds he sees at the clinic. He learns to see the depth of the color red as it spurts from Victor Pascow’s head in gushes and bursts. He learns to see the glimpse of shattered bone and exposed brain as something akin to art.

And the blood-drained skin has a certain appeal. And the blind, blue eyes seem as beautiful as anything Louis has ever seen on his and Rachel’s trips to art museums. She sleeps next to him, her hand curled near her mouth like she’s clutching something close to her, and she has no clue that he’s lying awake waiting for the door to creak open, for the draft to breeze in, for Victor to come and whisk him away into the night air.

And when Victor finally arrives, Louis isn’t sure whether he’s asleep or awake, but he knows he’s vibrating with anticipation, that the thought of seeing Victor again — that walking corpse, that medical marvel, that impossibility with the unseeing eyes and the cracked skull — has made him agonizingly hard, has turned his cock into an aching erection straining at his boxer shorts.

Victor stops at the side of the bed, his hand extended. If Louis takes it — if he leaves the cover of the blankets, if he abandons Rachel, asleep in their bed — he will be exposed. He sees a vision of himself following along behind Victor like a puppy, half-naked and hard in his boxers, and willing to follow Victor everywhere.

 _What’s happened to me?_ Louis thinks.

He takes Victor’s hand, and for just a moment, as Victor’s fingers curl around his own, he could swear the other man is still warm.


End file.
